How Do I Recover a Missing or Deleted Email in Gmail?

Gmail, the free email service developed by multinational technology giant Google in 2004, is the world's most popular free email service with over 1.5 billion users worldwide. The company has done an outstanding job in not only maintaining, upgrading, and adding new features to their service over the past 15 years, but also in providing excellent customer support for Gmail. This is great news for Gmail users trying to recover a deleted email or find a missing email.

How Do I Find A Missing Email Or Recover A Deleted Email In Gmail?

Note: If you seem to have lost or deleted a large number of emails for no apparent reason, or emails seem to mysteriously missing on a regular basis, it's possible your Gmail account has been compromised. You should change your Gmail password immediately.

The most common reasons emails go lost or missing is because Gmail users have accidentally moved, archived, or deleted them, or even inadvertently marked them as spam. However, there are several other reasons emails can go missing, or appear lost or deleted such as forwards, filters, and others. To locate your lost or deleted emails, follow these steps.

1. Navigate to the Gmail website on your web browser and login to your account.
2. Click (the down arrow) in the Search box located top-center of your browser.
3. From the options provided, click the All Mail drop down and select Mail & Spam & Trash.
4. If you know some of the information from the missing email enter them in the appropriate fields and click the Search button.

If your missing emails are not found, proceed to the next steps to ensure your email was not filtered.

1. Select the Settings icon () from the top right of your Gmail page.
2. Click Filters and Blocked Addresses from the list of settings at the top.
3. Look for any filters that contain the words "Skip inbox" or Delete it." If any are found, click Delete to the right and follow the on-screen instructions.

If you're still unable to locate your lost email, follow the steps below to ensure your missing email was not forwarded.

1. From the same Gmail settings screen, select Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
2. Check in the Forwarding section to see if your email is being forwarded, if so make sure you have Keep Gmail's copy in the Inbox or Mark Gmail's copy as read-only chosen.

If you're still unable to find your email utilizing the methods above, you can try to use the Gmail Message Recovery Tool. The tool will confirm your Gmail account information and run a series of internal processes to recover your lost or deleted emails and provide you a "Recovery result."

Please note that deleted emails stay in your Trash for 30 days, after which they are permanently deleted. Permanently deleted emails in Gmail cannot be recovered. Likewise, emails in the Gmail Spam forward are also permanently deleted after 30 days.

Conclusion

Gmail affords it's users numerous ways to locate and recover missing or deleted emails along with safeguards to ensure these emails are not lost forever for 30 days. Gmail users not satisfied with the default 30-day "save period" should use Google TakeOut to download/export their Gmail and attachments (as well as other Google data) either once or automatically every two months (for a year) as a .zip file.